LynAlden on Nostr: Privacy is normal and good. There has been an effort among authorities to make ...

Privacy is normal and good.

There has been an effort among authorities to make “money laundering” and “financial privacy” the same thing. That is, the mere act of moving money privately itself becomes a crime. That’s not okay.

Money laundering is when money that is obtained through crime is concealed by obfuscating it with clean money. The actual crime is the initial non-financial crime (say, mob stuff), and historically money laundering involves manual activity to work with the criminals.

Now that open source tech can make certain transactions private, authorities increasingly equate all private money transfer with money laundering, even if the developer of the open source tech had no direct involvement with criminals. Authorities target them regardless, and sanction the technology itself. Financial privacy becomes synonymous with crime in their minds, and in the minds of the public.